I’ve just finished preparing slides for my lecture in string algorithms tomorrow.It took about 15 minutes, and that was spend on reformatting the slides to the new version of OpenOffice.org Impress (for some reason the text always jumps about a bit when the version of OOo changes).In comparison I spent all Sunday preparing for my lectures in genome analysis, a class I am teaching for the first time this term. Having a clear idea about what to cover in the lecture, and of course having old slides to pick from when preparing the presentation, really speeds up the preparation.I guess one of the reasons I have managed so little research this year is that I have taken on three completely new courses (in addition to two old ones) to teach. Next year I only have one new class to teach and four that I have already taught before, so that isn’t so bad.

About a year ago I took down my blog to save the web server. My home-grown blogging software couldn’t cope with the traffic and the very inefficient backend data representation I used for the postings and archives so I decided to take it down for a bit while I found some software elsewhere to run the blog on. that took a while.

Now I’m running wordpress and I am looking forward to trying it out. So far I am quite happy with it, but then so far I have really only played with it and not done any “serious” blogging, so we will see how it goes. Anyway, with wordpress I have the option of hacking the underlying code, so I’ll get flexibility similiar to my homegrown code, but without the inefficiency. That isn’t bad in my book.

For the layout I’ve just picked a theme from wordpress and tweaked it a little bit. I guess I am going to play with the themes a bit more before I’ll worry about writing my own theme. For one thing, I am getting the impression that I need to understand PHP before I can do much on the blog, so I’ll have to look into that, but my time is very limited these days so I don’t know when I’ll get around to it.